Architectural Principles Quotes

The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations.

The foundation stones of a great building are destined to groan and be pressed upon; it is not for them to crown the edifice.

The difference between a good and a poor architect is that the poor architect succumbs to every temptation and the good one resists it.

Architecture is the masterly, correct and magnificent play of masses brought together in light. Our eyes are made to see forms in light; light and shade reveal these forms; cubes, cones, spheres, cylinders or pyramids are the great primary forms which light reveals to advantage; the image of these is distinct and tangible within us without ambiguity. It is for this reason that these are beautiful forms, the most beautiful forms. Everybody is agreed to that, the child, the savage and the metaphysician.

Architecture theory is very interesting.

Nature is my manifestation of God. I go to nature every day for inspiration in the day's work. I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

The design of a temple depends on symmetry, the principles of which must be most carefully observed by the architect.

You can never draw enough or read enough - reading about architecture, in other words.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect.

We must be as familiar with the functions of our building as with our materials. We must learn what a building can be, what it should be, and also what it must not be.

The organic laws of construction tangled me in my desires, and only with great pain, effort, and struggle did I break through these 'walls around art.

An architect ought to be an educated man so as to leave a more lasting remembrance in his treatises.

Architecture is a discipline that takes time and patience. If one spends enough years writing complex novels one might be able, someday, to construct a respectable haiku.

The sense of space within the reality of any building is a new concept wherever architecture is concerned. But it is essential ancient principle just the same and is not only necessary now but implied by the ideal of democracy itself.

Architecture trumps licensing any time.

I studied in London in 1968. Our school had a separate department of tropical architecture. Of course it was totally unfashionable, partly because nobody wanted to think about colonialism, but basically what you learned there was that, OK, the sun is here, so you should create natural ventilation here - an unbelievable amount of really sound principles that have been completely abandoned, so now everything is air conditioned with big machines.

In all matters but particularly in architecture, that which is signified is the subject of which we may be speaking and that which gives significance is a demonstration on scientific principles. One who professes himself an architect should be well versed in both directions.

In architecture, Palladio is the game. It means hard thought all through - if it is labored, it fails.

Vitruvius, the great writer, architect and engineer, identified in his famous treatise on Architecture that the three values essential to any work of Architecture were: firmitas, utilitas, and venustas; or firmness, utility, and delight. Firmness meaning well built, solid and resistant; utility meaning useful and functional, and delight meaning beautiful.

If you're talking to an architect, he can look at a blank piece of paper, and once the initial design is there, the formula kicks in. Each room should have something unique and different about it - much the same way that in a song, every eight bars or so, a new piece of information should be introduced.

I haven't changed my mind about modernism from the first day I ever did it... It means integrity; it means honesty; it means the absence of sentimentality and the absence of nostalgia; it means simplicity; it means clarity. That's what modernism means to me.

I discovered by working with actual glass models that the important thing is the play of reflections and not the effect of light and shadow, as in ordinary buildings.

All architecture, classical or not, must have some sense of order, and order is much harder to achieve without the straight lines and right angles that have dominated the building art from time immemorial.

Newton, for instance, attempted to comprehend the diversities of the universe with a single system of mathematical laws, the objectivity, sobriety and logic of Palladian architecture presented an aesthetic formula which, while accepting variations and adjustments according to climate and other needs, could be applied universally.